Max Scheuer (9 September 1895 – post August 1941) was an Austrian international footballer who played the defender position. He played for the Austria national football team in the 1923 season. In the 1920s, he played for and captained Hakoah Vienna. He was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp at some point after August 1941.
Biography Scheuer was born in Austria, and was Jewish.Bernard Postal, Jesse Silver, Roy Silver (1965). Encyclopedia of Jews in Sports
Scheuer was in the starting lineup and played as a defender for the Austria national football team against the Hungary national football team in a FIFA match in the 1923 season.
In the 1920s Scheuer played for and captained Hakoah Vienna, an all-Jewish club.David Bolchover (2017). The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory; The Story of Béla GuttmanAlan McDougall (2020). Contested Fields; A Global History of Modern Football With the team he won the Austrian championship in the 1924–25 Austrian First League season, the first professional Austrian football title.
In 1927, he and the team came to the United States to play the Bethlehem Steel Football Club in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the defending U.S. champion and 1926-27 champion of the American Soccer League."HAKOAH SOCCER TEAM HERE FOR BIG CLASH; Vienna Stars Quartered at Hotel Bethlehem -- Game at Lehigh Tomorrow; STEEL TEAM IN TOP FORM," The Globe-Times -- Bethlehem, April 19, 1927. He fled Austria to France, and played briefly for Olympique Marseille.Kevin E. Simpson (2016). Soccer Under the Swastika; Stories of Survival and Resistance During the HolocaustWilliam Bowman (2011). "Hakoah Vienna and the International Nature of Interwar Austrian Sports," Central European History 44, 642–68.
He was captured by the Nazis while he was in France, on his way to neutral Switzerland. Aged 45, Scheuer was sent to Drancy internment camp in France, and then to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was killed in the early 1940s.
Scheuer was one of at least seven Hakoah footballers killed in the Holocaust.Anthony Clavane (2012). Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?; The Story of English Football's Forgotten Tribe Others were Josef Kolisch, Ali Schönfeld, Oskar Grasgrün, Ernst Horowitz, and the brothers Erwin Pollak and Oskar Pollak.
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